I have loved Jackie Speier since that terrible day in November 1978 when she accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, Guyana to investigate Jim Jones and his People’s Temple. Directly subsequent to their visit, Jones ordered his congregation to drink the Kool-Aid, literally, and it is from that event that the expression derives. It was reportedly grape-flavored and contained cyanide along with valium and other ingredients. 918 people died including children and infants. Death from cyanide poisoning is said to be excruciating.

Congressman Ryan and his delegation, including Jackie and news staff, were attacked on the tarmac at Port Kaituma while attempting to leave for home after their investigation. At that time, they were unaware of Jones’s suicide order. You can read a full account here >>>>.

Because Jackie’s name came up in this article that has been circulating, I thought it might be a good idea to expand a little on this courageous public servant.

She was elected to Ryan’s seat in the House in 2008.

Her given name is not Jackie. She took Jacqueline as her Confirmation name in honor of Jackie Kennedy and goes by that name. Her first husband died in an auto accident when she was pregnant in 1987.

When she lay bullet-ridden at Port Kaituma, she thought she would never live to marry and have children.

JONESTOWN AND THE CITY HALL ASSASSINATIONS Jackie Speier remembers day of massacre and mass suicide in Guyana

Rep. Jackie Speier, Special to The Chronicle

Published 4:00 am, Monday, November 17, 2008

“I’m 28 years old, and I am about to die.”

I was curled up behind the wheel of an airplane on a jungle airstrip in Guyana, South America. This isn’t what I expected when I signed on to work for a United States congressman. Our fact-finding trip to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown had gone horribly wrong. I lay as still as I could, pretending to be dead, as an unknown gunman pumped five bullets into me at close range. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop.

When the shooting stopped, I looked around and saw bodies, including that of my boss and mentor, Congressman Leo Ryan. Wasto investigate he, too, pretending to be dead? I called his name, but he didn’t respond. Looking down, I saw what appeared to be a bone. It was my own, and it was sticking out of my shattered right arm.

The thought raced through my mind: “I’m 28 years old, and I am about to die. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. I will never turn 80, never marry, never have children.”

Jackie has never backed down from a righteous battle. She accompanied Congressman Ryan on a Greenpeace mission in March 1978 to investigate the slaughter of baby harp seals in Newfoundland. Not much can be worse than witnessing babies bludgeoned before their mothers’ eyes and being unable to do anything to stop it. But Jackie has been through worse. She thought she would die and never have children. When she knew she would live, she was told she might lose limbs. Her arm and leg were shot up.

But a fighter is a fighter, and don’t tell Jackie she cannot bare arms!

The Democratic women of the House have instituted a brand-new holiday in Washington: sleeveless Friday. Sparked by California Congresswoman Jackie Speier, several House Democrats arrived to Congress on July 14 wearing sleeveless dresses as part of a campaign to modernize the House dress code.

Female lawmakers began these efforts after a reporter was banned from entering the Speaker’s Lobby last week for wearing a sleeveless dress. The rules, which are enforced only on the House side of the Capitol, are not new—but after the incident last week, Speaker Paul Ryan released an announcement reiterating the dress code, per CBS:

“Members should periodically rededicate themselves to the core principles of proper parliamentary practice that are so essential to maintaining order and deliberacy here in the House.”

Speier and her colleagues took to the Capitol—and to Twitter—to make their opinions heard. On Thursday, Speier released a flyer via Twitter urging other female lawmakers to wear sleeveless dresses this Friday, and to take a photo in their sleeveless finery together Friday afternoon.

Yes! Shot up arm and all, Jackie went for “Sleeveless Friday” on the Hill and took her colleagues along with her! Go Jackie! Lead on! you are a hero! We’re so glad you got to be a mom and a leader in Congress!

Those watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu cannot be faulted for thinking they might be living a cyncial version of the old 1940s “Road” pictures with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. (Who gave her that name?!) A movie called “The Road to Gilead.” Emily Peck has other ideas, but there are portents that cannot be denied.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” resonates, but there’s reason for hope.

You’d have to be fairly clueless about the current political moment not to feel a shiver of recognition watching “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the new dystopian drama on Hulu.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s bestselling novel, the show debuted Wednesday after weeks of politically fueled anticipation. The timing is apt. The action takes place in Gilead, a fictional future America that has been taken over by a fundamentalist group of men who systematically strip away women’s rights.

That description might remind viewers of President Donald Trump’s first Monday in office when, surrounded by other men, he signed off on the global gag rule ― an anti-abortion order that restricts women’s reproductive rights around the world. Or, perhaps it also brings to mind Vice President Mike Pence, who chooses not to socialize alone with women who are not his wife.

Even Trump fanatics saw the connection, calling the show anti-Trump propaganda.

Peck is pretty optimistic positing that the road to Gilead is fraught with lots of potholes and obstructions, but we do well not to focus too narrowly on the falling rock on one side of the highway thereby missing the sheer cliff on the other side.

I am not watching “The Handmaid’s Tale,” much as I would like to. I simply refuse to pay another dollar beyond my already expensive FiOS service, so Hulu and Netflix are out for me. I have, however, read the book. The coincidence of the airing of the mini-series with the Democratic “Unity Tour” should set off some bells and whistles.

This is the axiom Peck offers that Bernie supporters continue to reject.

They rejected it during the 2016 primaries renouncing any and all incremental policies proposed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and stubbornly continued their opposition during the general election. They persist in their unwillingness to allow the Democratic Party to evolve naturally and have set out to take it over and overturn the common sense principles that have been its warp and woof since the groundbreaking days of FDR. Rather than empowering women, the party is rolling back its liberating positions on women under the influence of a man who refuses to join the party. No, this is not a relitigation or extension of the 2016 primaries. It is a fight for the future.

The parallels between the dystopia Atwood projected and perceived potential effects of the new administration are not limited to Trump’s positions and those of his cronies. The BernieBros continue to have a hand in suppressing female issues, concerns, and voices within the only party likely to continue to highlight them.

Women have a stake in resisting efforts on either side to curtail our rights and freedoms. Resisters must do it for ourselves. But we must be careful not to lose the party. That is where the strength is. The reason the BernieBots are fighting to usurp that power is because they know that a third party will have no muscle except to do what they have done in 2000 and 2016 – split the progressive vote.

We must remember that there was a reason why, at the end of her senior thesis, Hillary Clinton spurned Saul Alinsky’s methods (i.e. change from without the system rather than within) as well as the job he offered her and opted for the discipline of law school instead. We have to be in it to win it.

Leaving the party is no solution. Think hard before you do that because it is not only the Trump crowd that would happily see us in shades of red, blue, green, and stripes according to their designations of how we serve. We cannot determine our fate from the outside. The Bernie crowd knows this, and that is why they fight to take over the party. Let’s not just abandon it to them.

Just going to put this out there #FWIW: If only Black and Latina women were getting abortions, would the GOP guys be trying to rule women’s bodies?

The answer is no.

What they want is age-old. The Catholic Church rules this way for the same reason.

They want white women to repopulate a diminishing white population – by force and by law if necessary.

Heads up!

White people are inexorably headed to minority status in the United States.

Even if white people remained the majority, there is no evidence that voters would tolerate racist legislation.

A few things are for sure, though. Women constitute the majority of the electorate, and we don’t care much for white men making decisions about women’s health care.

When they banish funding for Planned Parenthood, they block necessary health care for women and men: testing for STDs and cancer – blocked. Birth control – also blocked.

You balding, white-haired men do not represent women or our best interests in any way. You just want white women to pop out as many babies as possible to sustain a demographic majority in this country. What a poorly considered agenda!

Repopulation by birth rate is a cruel and shoddy agenda. Women are not baby machines.

The morning after the inauguration of the least popular incoming president in modern history, millions boarded all manner of transportation to head to their nearest (or dearest) Women’s March. Many flew or took trains or buses to Washington, DC for the march there. Others went to cities near them.

The numbers are not in yet but there are estimates – almost all of which exceeded expectations. Washington, DC expected 200,000. Estimates are that a half a million showed up. In New York City, the crowd was so large that for hours the march could not move appreciably for lack of space. The same thing happened in Chicago where organizers transformed the march into a rally – no space for people to march! Reports are that the same thing occurred in Los Angeles.

Portland ME police estimated this to be the largest demonstration they had ever encountered. Boston organizers think 150,000 attended there. People tweeted pictures of crowds in Denver, Nashville, Asheville, Atlanta, Sioux City, Phoenix, of a human chain across the Golden Gate Bridge. Across the nation they marched – in the rain in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and in the snow in Boise and Anchorage.

There were marches and demonstrations in all 50 states and on every continent, including Antarctica. Look at this map!

Here are a few of my favorite images from the day starting with a sea of pink pussyhats in the nation’s capital.

Paris put its message in lights.

The Brits displayed their characteristic reserve. They had the best signs.

My favorite Brit marched in New York and declared herself a New Yorker.

Helen Mirren posted “this is amazing!” (Instagram / @helenmirren

A human traffic jam in Los Angeles.

A human chain across the Golden Gate Bridge.

In blinding snow in Anchorage.

In Boise.

Antarctica!

Some awesome folks!

They weren’t all Democrats! Ana Navarro posted this selfie!

A note from a flight attendant who had to work to a passenger who was attending.

The human traffic jam on NY’s 5th Avenue that lasted for hours.

In Detroit.

New York City.

This woman tweeted that she wasn’t ovary-acting.

How bad is it?

One guy we know brought his best friend along for his first day as a private citizen.

On the sidelines, this day, Donald Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast and visited CIA HQ in Langley, VA to tell them what a yuge inauguration he had (it looked like a million – a million-and-a-half people to the guy who saw imaginary thousands in Jersey City celebrating the fall of the towers) and how spectacular the weather had been (it rained – George W. Bush struggled with a plastic poncho). Later his Press Sec stormed into the White House press room to scold the media for telling the truth about the paltry attendance yesterday. He said this was the largest inauguration ever. Period. He took no questions and left in a huff.

The rest of the country and the free world was busy having a lovely Saturday all together. No incidents, no arrests, and according to actress Ally Sheedy, a patrol officer told her how wonderful everyone looked. Everyone was included – babies in strollers and seniors in wheelchairs. It was a great day in history!

I had a friend, years ago, whose father suffered what was diagnosed as hysterical blindness. Nothing was wrong with his eyes according to top ophthalmologists. Yet he stumbled along, tripping on furniture while never, mysteriously, over the dogs he loved. His only son, my friend, was a rising artist bringing more wealth to an already affluent family. He was gay at a time when and in a culture where being gay was not only not cool, it brought shame and social alienation similar to that incurred by mental illness in the family.

The parents lived in the main house, and my friend erected a loft two stories high on the other side of the garden where he occupied the first floor and worked on the second under a skylight. He came and went as he pleased and entertained friends as he wished. Was it perhaps my friend’s independent life that precipitated this blindness of his dad’s? It occurred shortly after the loft was completed. Were there things the dad simply could not allow himself to accept and see? Is that why he blinded himself? One can only speculate. We will never know. The father is long gone, and the son succumbed before there were effective HIV-AIDS medications.

How sad and ironic, in the wake of this election, when the unfairly maligned Clinton Foundation, which works assiduously to eradicate HIV-AIDS and preventable blindness, that Americans need to be warned not to succumb to a self-disciplined form of viral blindness that can spread via mass media.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

Naked

His polls numbers will…improve. The international community will…come around. Melania and Ivanka will be…unorthodox but charming. Brace yourselves for a huge media fail.

Joy-Ann Reid

11.27.16

In the children’s short story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Hans Christian Andersen, what kept the fiction of the naked emperor’s sartorial splendor alive was nothing in particular about the emperor. True, he was vain and plainly foolish; easily tricked by the false flattery of swindlers into paying a kingly sum for a cloak so fine and magical that only the wise and true could see it. But it was the people of the kingdom, including his trusted advisers, who maintained the absurd notion that he was splendidly clothed, because none – the emperor included – wanted to admit that they were so unworthy as to not see the bright colors and fine threads.

Only the characteristic bluntness of a child, who proclaimed the emperor’s nudity as he paraded through the streets humiliating himself and his kingdom, threatened to break the spell. But when the boy spoke out he was quickly rebuked by his father, who assured the gasping public that the child was clearly soft in the head. So powerful is the compulsion to normalize the powerful.

Three weeks ago tomorrow the improbable happened. It was not improbable that Americans would elect Donald Trump. It is never a total shock when Americans choose the candidate you thought sure to lose.

“You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore!” Really? Then, in 1968 they elected him. They’ll never put a second-rate former movie star in the White House. Meet Ronald Reagan 2.0, and Democrats helped elect him. George W. Bush seemed a laughable long shot in 1999, and we all know what happened then.

Trump campaigned as a scary clown in a season of scary clown sightings. He ridiculed cruelly: women, the disabled, the press. He threatened liberally: Latinos, Muslim, immigrants in general, our NATO allies. At the outset, many thought he was funny and too improbable to be elected. Some of us knew better. Some read the writing on Trump’s great wall.

The improbability was not that it could not happen. All my life I have been wary that it could indeed happen here. But every poll said it would not happen and had Hillary Clinton defeating Trump. After spending a year and a half reminding people that the only poll that matters is the actual vote, I too had come to believe that Hillary had this. I gave in to the certainty on the night before Election Day, unlike the Irish bookies who began paying out two weeks before the election. I kept working, but I really thought we had this at Independence Hall.

Washington (CNN)The racism and anti-Semitism of the alt-right movement were on display Saturday in Washington when its members gathered to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory.

The president of the alt-right National Policy Institute Richard Spender’s remarks were posted Sunday on YouTube by “Red Ice Radio,” which describes itself as “covering politics and social issues from a pro-European perspective.” The Atlantic magazine, which is recording footage of Spencer for a documentary they’re working on, also published a video of the same event showing audience members apparently giving the Nazi salute.

“Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” he declared.

His remarks were filled with racist imagery — including references to “the black political machines” and Latino housekeepers — as he bashed Hillary Clinton’s minority supporters.

More on this here. I urge you to read it. Even dedicated Republicans like Ana Navarro are tweeting about this. You might want to take a spoon of Pepto Bismol first. If this doesn’t make you sick, you are foolhardy, ignorant of history, or perhaps sick in more serious ways than OTC meds can help.

The POETUS’s Veep pick somehow managed to get tickets to see Hamilton on Broadway which has a wait list longer than Stanford. Hillary’s supporters at the performance also spoke out. This happened.

Donald Trump rounded on the ‘Hamilton’ cast for addressing Mike Pence when he visited the show. But Brandon Dixon and his peers were speaking truth to power in the purest form.

Tim Teeman

11.21.16 3:23 PM ET

It is heartening, for those who work in arts and culture, to see their work migrate to the front pages. It’s rare: The world of culture is seen as more rarefied than the 24-hour news cycle.

But the stratospheric success of Hamilton means it has often traversed both. It is that rare thing; an intelligent, stirring work of art that has found a populist home on stage on Broadway, feted not just by critics but by the general public who have been to see it. You’ll have seen its songs and stars on TV, if you haven’t seen them on stage. The difficulty of securing a ticket has become a mainstream joke.

The weekend bought the show back to the front page. One of the actors, Brandon Victor Dixon, gracefully read out a statement to the Vice President Elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience. It wasn’t rudely phrased. It wasn’t rudely spoken. It wasn’t rude in any way. We know this because it was videotaped. We can see it. If you choose to see it as harassment or rudeness, you are willfully misreading what you are seeing or hearing.

Dixon’s speech was a request from the heart, and—this seems to have been somewhat overlooked—a heartfelt plea to Pence to recognize and respect true diversity.

It was aimed at him because as Governor of Indiana he advocated for a range of discriminatory legislation, not least ‘conversion therapy,’ or discredited, cruel and downright weird ‘treatments’ to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality. He has also been accused of ignoring racism.

The gracefully read statement was immediately leapt upon by Donald Trump, the President-elect: he demanded the Hamilton cast apologize. They had been rude to Mike Pence. He had been in a safe space. How dare they?

Some contrast was provided here but of the snide variety. We could have done without words like smug and gushed. For Ms. Okafor’s information, Hillary Clinton is very warm, caring, and loving and is eminently huggable and kissable. We love the Grandma-in-Chief.

What was most improbable was that Americans would vote for someone supported by white nationalists who say things like this.

“America was until this last generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation and it belongs to us.” – RICHARD SPENCER, an ideologue of the alt-right movement, speaking to 200 mostlyyoung men in Washington.

We elect buffoons, crooks, grade B actors. I did not expect us to elect a potential despot. I thought we dodged that bullet with Nixon. I thought we closed the book on registries with the Nisei internment camps. I thought women would finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling by electing the most qualified and prepared candidate ever to run in my lifetime. I thought we were moving toward a more inclusive society. I thought a lot of things.

This is #NotWhoWeAre.

No sooner had I posted this than this letter from George Takei appeared in my inbox.

Still —

Just a few weeks after my fifth birthday, in the spring of 1942, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister, and me up very early, hurriedly dressed us, and quickly started to pack.

When my brother and I looked out the window of our living room, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They banged on our front door and ordered us out of the house. We could take only what we could carry with us.

We were loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families, with guards stationed at both ends of each car as though we were criminals, and sent two-thirds of the way across the country to an internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas.

For nearly three years, barbed wire, sentry towers, and armed guards marked home. Mass showers, lousy meals in crowded mess halls, and a searchlight following me as I ran from our barracks to the latrine in the middle of the night — in case I was trying to escape — became normal.

My mother was born in Sacramento, my father grew up in San Francisco, and my siblings and I were born in Los Angeles. We were American citizens, as proud of our country as we were of our Japanese heritage. But in the fear and mass hysteria of wartime, none of that mattered. When our government allowed hatred and racism to overtake our values, nothing else mattered.

We cannot allow our country to be led down that dark path ever again.

Rosemary, I am committed to fighting for our values, our democracy, and the moral character of our nation. And I am committed to standing with the Democratic Party against bigotry and oppression for the next four years and beyond, no matter what form it takes. I hope you will do the same. Add your name today to stand with me:

Every year on my birthday I travel to meet girls who are struggling to go to school — to stand with them and to make sure the world hears their stories.

Today in Dadaab I met Rahma Hussein Noor, a 19 year-old who has struggled more than most of us can imagine just to go to school.

Rahma came to Dadaab at age 13, having never set foot in a classroom. She worked hard to catch up with her classmates and, in a few years, graduated primary school.

Rahma then enrolled in a secondary school in Dadaab. But when her family returned to Somalia last year, Rahma could not find another school to attend.

After two months, her father said her education was over and decided to marry her to a man over 50 years old whom Rahma had never met.

Rahma snuck out of her house and took an eight day bus ride back to the refugee camp…all to continue her education.

Rahma is not alone. Many girls from Syria, Burundi, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all around the world have lost so much and are then forced to fight for a right they already have — the right to go to school.

Last year, the world agreed to provide 12 years of education for every boy and girl. Yet, nearly one year after making the commitment, where do we stand?

We are facing a global refugee crisis and more and more girls like Rahma are at risk of losing their chance to go to school — and their dreams for a better future.

We cannot allow girls like Rahma to fight alone. It’s time to do right by girls — #YesAllGirls.

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